An explanation

So those of you who read my blog on any regular basis know that I've been obsessing over the God of Small Things for quite a while. The last 5 months to be approximately exact. Which is weird because thats not me. I usually reserve this level of obsession for my relationships. And myself. And its even more weird that it was the one book in which I couldn't relate to the lives of any of the characters. And yet I loved the story. I loved sitting in it and watching the characters dance for me, like the book was a Kathakali performance. If you've read the book, you'll know that there is a scene with a Kathakali performance. In a small temple by a dying river, through the night, where no one is invited and yet everyone is. Like a secret. Thats how I felt reading the book. Like I'm leaning against a pillar and watching as a family lives out its choices. And the story, the story itself? It was like the universe colliding in slow motion, like having the pieces fall into place slowly just in time to fall apart, like watching the past rise up to meet the future. It was like nothing I've ever seen before, nothing I've ever thought I'd fall in love with. I went in ready to hate the story and I sat down against a pillar to watch and now the music has ended and the dancers have gone, but I'm still stuck in the story, in the beauty and the ugliness of it. Which is why I am sitting up in bed, writing about it at midnight like it is something precious. Like something secret.


There are some books that come with their own age limits, that have to be grown into, for which a certain life has to be lived to be respected and understood and if possible loved. I dont claim any wisdom I do not have. Or experience I havent gained. It was just that I read the book when I was at a point in my life where I was willing to accept pain. Willing to acknowledge it and let it pass. And smile wryly and go to sleep. It may be that you ought to be old and wise to fall in love with the story that way. Or it may be that you just have to be that kind of animal.

I hate it when my laundry doesn’t dry

Isnt it funny how the mood of your entire day can be determined by the efficiency of your dryer? The elation you feel when you open the dryer to drag your laundry out and touch warm dry clothes is indescribable. On the flipside, this is what you get when your drying cycle doesn’t go well- an angry irritable me. Today has been an exceptionally bad day. I am trying to not crib on my blog too much and lock all this negative zen for all of internet’s posterity but today has been one of those ‘Adam Sandler comic loser movie’ kind of days. It all started with cramps and an uh-oh moment in the bathroom right at the beginning of work. Then came 8 hours of nothingness, staring blankly into my laptop and the 3 and a half walls of my cubicle, with nothing, absolutely nothing to do except drink bad vending machine coffee every 2 hours. Then came the bad dryer incident. Then came trying to fix the bad dryer incident by blow drying my moist tshirt (yeah i had to wear those clothes. I didn’t have anything else to wear after my shower) with a hair dryer and accidently shorting some fuse in some cynical universe’s plan and plunging half the room into darkness. So am sitting here in my wet bra with my wet hair trying to think warm thoughts and lull myself into a sleep before i do any more swearing. And oh yeah all of us have to use the bathroom facilities in darkness, save for the torchlight we have set up to compensate for the lack of electric lighting, thanks to me.

Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!

*Happy thoughts. Warm thoughts. Happy thoughts*

My resolutions for the month are going fine. They are: a) smile and make eye contact and/or nod my head and say hello when I pass a random stranger in the corridor as opposed to staring awkwardly at some spot on the ceiling or take an immediate interest in my phone and b) not be cynical and to be more supportive of my friends plans for the future. My dominating cynical subconscious half would like to interject that fine might be too optimistic a word to use to describe the progress of my resolutions but lets just ignore it for now.

Summer in general is going great. Which is why summers are and always have been my favourite time of year (Christmas is second). 2 of my friends left India for the green shores of USA yesterday and I’ve been nostalgia tripping back to my own journey last year ever since. 1 other friend is doing the opposite route, leaving behind the American continent to go back to mother India. 3 friends in the air. God speed to them.

I will start shopping for my India trip soon, as soon as i get my next salary. In the meantime, i make lists, amend them, change them, make new ones every day on the people who deserve my US returnee gifts. Sometimes i am in a lenient mood and i add everyone who has ever called me or texted me since i have come to the US to my list (which, dear readers, is a very small group of people). Other times, i strike out whole subclasses of people from my list. This usually happens after i have checked my bank balance for the umpteenth time. Ah, the feeling of playing God!

I think i am getting a headache.

The Cost of Sanity

Now that the dust has settled in the happy land of ‘no assignments and no project submissions’ aka Real Life, the little green monsters, formerly concealed, begin to emerge and I realize not all is glittering and sunny in my new found world. And I realize that the source of this non-glitteriness and non-sunniness is, in fact, (surprise surprise) me. While assignments and projects gave me plenty of reasons to crib, they took away valuable time that I could have to used to do said cribbing. And time to discover any more things to crib about. Life’s tiny compromises were always hidden by the fact that there were larger things looming on my horizon to worry about. Now that the larger things have been dealt with (temporarily), the little things start their gnawing at my attention. Big God and Small God as Arundhati Roy would have said (Yes, I quote her a lot these days, especially since I am rereading the God of Small Things). So the Small Demons in my case, start rearing their head now that the Big Demons have wandered elsewhere to demonize (and I seem to be able to track their progress from the phone calls I do not get and the words I do not hear). And irritation oozes like a common stench through my days. People piss me off more than they used to and my patience with them bleeds away faster than it used to. I hate them and yet I need them and I hate myself for hating them and I hate myself for needing them. Even my dreams seem to be restless and unfocused and I wake up disgusted at myself, my memories of reality tainted by my subconscious. So it is a lot of hating and a lot of negativity that brought me here, writing like a therapy while searching for productive things to do. In school, when I felt hatred rising in me, I would go to the gym and punch out a few calories while listening to loud music. Not only would that release some much needed endorphins, it also served s a subconscious incentive to not be negative (my mind can conjure up reasons to not work out), I believe.  Now, with no convenient outlet or release and not wanting to make it obvious that I am annoyed, I turn my annoyance inwards and sit passively with my laptop in my hands, crawling the web for a distraction. Until it becomes obvious to everyone that I am annoyed. That is the problem for us extroverts. We can’t shut the world out as easily as the rest of the world can and contrary to popular belief, we do need our vacations from the world, as much as the other person.

Space. That is the problem. And the fact that it is a relative and ever changing factor in the equation of personal happiness and sanity.

This is why I write. The fact that although it offers no answer, sometimes, I can figure out the question.

Miss miss...

I miss

The sound of traffic driving past uneven Veteran avenue, where I first lived in Los Angeles and my friends continue to live.

The sound of helicopters flying above at all times of the day and night.

The sound of sirens every few minutes.

I miss

The two buses I take to go to USC across town to meet friends. Driving past the lit up streetlights arcade at LACMA, past the fancy boutiques of Miracle Mile, past the mannequins in bridal gowns in brightly lit windows.

The walk to Ralphs in Westwood, past the Ronald Reagan Medical Center where Michael Jackson died and Britney Spears allegedly sought psychiatric help.

Sitting at Kirchoff hall coffee shop and sipping on warm coffee looking at the people around me and feeling the warmth of the room.

Walking past the Internet room and feeling humbled, touching the walls trying to feel history seeped into them, trying to imagine the countless discussions the corridors would have seen, glad to be a part of the place, just to touch and feel the greatness of it and the ordinariness of it.

Coming home to my space, sitting on my bed and drinking the coffee I made and a few minutes of music and calm.

Friends dropping by randomly to have a cup of coffee and sometimes an omelette.

Cooking with spices in my tiny kitchen and breathing the smell of them for the rest of the day.

Catching snippets of Master Chef Australia between reading papers.

Walking back home from the library, the wind biting my skin, listening to ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

Texting friends in the middle of class, planning lunch outdoors.

Petting Elvis and Princess, the two huskies who take a break next to the Bruin bear statue everyday at 3.30 after a long walk around campus with Tom, their Master/Grandpa.

I miss

Venice Beach.

LA.

Home.

Another sun soaked season

An ECG graph. That’s what my life looks like now. Flat lines with sudden spurts of activity. Or maybe that’s not what an ECG graph looks like. Anyway, days are the same. I wake up, get ready, walk 17 minutes to my work with my ipod pugged into my ears, and huge oversized glasses hiding half my face.  Don’t meet people I know on the way, in fact I don’t meet anyone at all. So I float along in my self sufficient little universe with my ipod and my sunglasses, lost in thought and music. Life at work is a blur of semi-activity. I bug my manager for something to do. Sometimes I get something, sometimes I don’t. After 1/3^rd of my day in my cubicle, I walk back home along the same tree lined suburban streets, the same self sufficient little bubble. I then proceed to watch a couple of House episodes on tv or my laptop, read a little, gossip a little with my roommate and go back to sleep. Sometimes I try to force myself to call someone, like I would have in LA. But life just doesn’t seem interesting enough to convey details about to someone on the other end of the line, or on a blog for that matter. Which explains the slow post weeks this month.  The Divya I knew who loved having people around her, talking to her all the time seems to have imploded. Now there is just one bored person grudgingly happy with her self sufficient shell.

The long weekend was different though. For once, I didn’t have to be the planner and just had to show up looking pretty. That was fun. A friend of a friend initiated the plan and it snowballed with everyone invited inviting everyone else. So armed with a GPS and debit cards, we travelled to the far, tourist-free (relatively) corners of the world (or atleast the Californian world) and basked in the sun on beaches and got pushed around by the cold wind on cliffs. And when that got boring, we decided to let ourselves get thrown out of perfectly good airplanes at 13000 ft AGL in the name of adventure sport. The skydiving got decided so randomly that I didn’t even have time to work myself into a fear. I think reality first really truly punched me when I boarded the plane and it started climbing. But then I got caught up in all the harnessing and the strapping to my instructor that I got distracted. And then I was so tightly strapped on to him (a rather hunky him, I would like to note) that I couldn’t have backed off even if I had wanted to. And then I was out the door. And boy, was it surreal. I expected to drop like a stone the way the coyote does in all the roadrunner shows. Instead I felt like I was floating along. Apparently that’s because you are falling with such a high acceleration that the air starts behaving like a liquid (Fluid Dynamics 101 by an instructor who had a Masters in Electrical Engineering and decided to quit her engineering job to sky dive professionally, atleast for a while). So anyway I jumped off a plane and in a single day achieved super stardom on Facebook and the Real World. Even my manager wanted to know what it felt like and noted down the address of the sky diving place.  

The friend I wrote about here is getting married tomorrow.  Two more are getting married in Sptember. I am getting my paycheck in a couple of hours, so I am all excited and making plans with the money I don’t yet have. Contrary to popular culture, I want to get myself something with my first salary, and then maybe something for Anjana and Maya if I have any money left. And then probably my family with my next paycheck. I have starved myself of the lifestyle I was accustomed to in India for so long, that I just want to pamper myself first without feeling obligated to get stuff for other people. The long weekend trip was a good start. And hopefully the clothes and the shoes and the bags and the hot-shoe clip on flash for my camera that I am planning to get will be a nice continuation. I also wanted to get my mom a Blackberry Playbook for her 50^th bday that I missed but my aunt beat me to it and got her a different tablet PC. So now I have to think of alternative gifts. Any suggestions, anybody? And while you are at it, it would also be great if you could suggest suitable wedding gifts to get the friends who are getting married.

I am all excited about going to India. I just want to relax at home and get taken care off for 20 days. I don’t want to ever step out of the house, except for my friends’ weddings and one night out at 10d with my school girl friends. Everybody else who wants to can come visit me at home. For some reason, I don’t even seem to want to go visit people. Another sign that I am becoming anti-social apart from the dwindling phonecalls. Maybe it is just latent irritation from the last 1 year bubbling up, all the unreturned phonecalls and the unwished birthday. Or maybe it is just normal growing up and moving on. Whatever it is, I don’t seem to be interested except to be disinterestedly intrigued by it. Which considering its me, is weird.

Overall, the summer is warm and slow and languid. And sparkling, like the champagne I tasted at the Wine tasting I went to. The kind of summer that makes you sing ‘Stolen’ by Dashboard Confessionals at the top of your voice. The kind of summer that is ideal for romance and dreams. Makes me of last summer with its brimming emotions and something always happening. It also makes me think of how lucky I am, to be where I am, doing what I wanted to. How many people can lay claim to that? Sure, life will change soon and my blog may take a dip towards the other end of the spectrum soon, but I want to drink deep and savor this while it lasts. And worry about feeling tipsy later.

That’s it for now. I will hopefully have more to write about soon. Meanwhile, the song I am currently addicted to is Lamha by Bilal Khan from Coke Studio Pak. I am absolutely in love with it and thanks to my playing it everyday, my roommate is addicted to it too. I hope you love it as much as I do.

That's one of the beaches we went to

And the lighthouse on the cliff we trekked to

And a view from the cliff itself

And a picture of me sky diving

Those are just to show why I am so in love with awesome golden California. Somehow the pics never look as good on the blog as they do on my camera. Its a beautiful place, people. Trust me.